I've been tagged by blogging and social media superstar Lindy Dryer in the Word of Mouth Meme that Lindy's partner in crime, Maddie Grant, started recently. The point of this meme is to simply share stories about how word of mouth plays a part in all aspects of association management (or organizations more broadly). She asked me to share a story about generations, and the closest I can come is a story about how a bunch of Generation X association consultants wrote and published a book.

There were five of us in all: Jeff De Cagna, David Gammel, Mickie Rops, Amy Smith, and myself. We were friends and colleagues in the association community who shared a similar passion for pushing back against the association establishment (in a loving way, of course). We thought it would be fun and interesting to do a project together and after much debate, we settled on the idea for a book. We started with the title: We Have Always Done it That Way: 101 Things about Associations We Must Change. And then each of us spent time writing the 101 things via a blog. Writing a book on a blog is already a bit word of mouth–we each shared what we were writing on our own blogs and asked for comments. But we also promoted it word of mouth.

At the Great Ideas Conference in San Diego we actually printed a couple hundred sprial bound excerpts of what we had written so far and gave it away. We think we got some attention from the cover graphic:

Underneath "We Have Always Done it That Way" we had that image and the words (So, how's that working for you).

Then just a few months later we had a first published paperback edition of the book (thanks to Lulu.com). We gave away a few hundred of them at the Annual Meeting in Boston. Each author gave them away, offering a prize to anyone whou would bring us back a copy signed by all five of the authors (the prize was claimed by WOM queen Maddie in December 2007).

The book did not become a New York Times best seller. It has, however, sold 1500 copies, and that is without one dollar spent on advertising or marketing. We simply shared and talked. The book is carried in the ASAE bookstore and Ben even suggested it should be required reading for the CAE exam.

Maddie said that Sernovitz's lessons for WOM are:

Make it easy.
Make it shareable.
Make it interesting.

Easy: We wrote the book as 100 short blog posts. You could search by category. You could read what you wanted to and skip the rest (or come back to it later).

Shareable: As a blog, it was inherently shareable. And along the way we gave away hard copies that people could read quickly and share with others.

Interesting: And we had fun. We provoked a bit. We had a title that people really resonated with.

So, have Amy Smith and Mickie Rops been tagged on this meme yet?